Sékou Touré

(redirected from Ahmed Sekou Toure)

Touré, Sékou

Born Jan. 9, 1922, in Faranah. State and political figure of the People’s Revolutionary Republic of Guinea.

The son of a Malinke peasant, Touré attended a French technical lycée in Conakry in 1936 and 1937. In the late 1930’s and early 1940’s he worked for private companies and in the postal service. While still a youth, Touré became involved in trade union and political work. He was one of the organizers of the first trade unions in Guinea for African workers, and in 1946 he helped found the African Democratic Union. In 1952, Touré became the secretary-general of Guinea’s Party-State (until November 1978, the Democratic Party of Guinea), founded in 1947. From 1956 to 1958 he was a deputy to the French National Assembly. In November 1958 he became president of the independent Republic of Guinea; from 1958 to 1972 he was also head of the government. In 1961, Touré received the International Lenin Prize for Strengthening Peace Among Nations. He made official visits to the USSR in 1959, 1960, and 1965.

Touré is the author of numerous works on issues concerning the African peoples’ struggle for independence. In his writings, he maintains that African nations, particularly Guinea, must develop along noncapitalist lines.

The founding fathers of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), such as Mwalimu Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Ahmed Sekou Toure of Guinea, Farahat Abbas of Algeria, Augustinho Neto of Angola, Samora Machel of Mozambique, Amilcar Cabral of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, and Oginga Odinga of Kenya have laid out the first building blocks of the organization's path.

Led by Ahmed Sekou Toure, head of the Democratic Party of Guinea (PDG), which won 56 of 60 seats in 1957 territorial elections, the people of Guinea in a September 1958 plebiscite overwhelmingly rejected membership in the proposed French Community.

The former colonial soldier led the world's number one bauxite exporter with strong-arm tactics since taking power in a coup in 1984, after Ahmed Sekou Toure, the West African country's first president, died in a US hospital.

Jackson excuses this behavior by a politician who admired some of Africa's autocrats like Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Guinea's Ahmed Sekou Toure by arguing that "It simply reflected his impatience with indecisiveness, and his aristocratic heritage" (p.

He was heavily involved in civil war in The Congo during the 1960s, led a group of mercenaries in a failed coup attempt to topple the regime of President Ahmed Sekou Toure in Guinea in 1970 and made another failed attempt in Benin in 1977.

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